To the Editor: Principles of Christianity lost in U.S. government

In the Feb. 10-16 edition, the RRT carried a letter by Mr. James Spelman responding to Mr. Bernard Reese’s latest guest commentary in the Register Star.

Mr. Spelman mentioned that “… the U.S. Constitution guarantees each of us the right to believe what we choose and to express our ideas freely without fear of recrimination.” In actual practice, conservative freedom of speech is not respected. The other gods and beliefs he mentioned are indeed to be shunned, here in the West.

He mentioned about all creeds espousing the fundamental principle which urges human beings to respect each other, without exception. There’s a matter of tribalism, regarding other nations and tribes as being lesser. Some pagan religions or creeds have that in them, and major religions, too, at least at some time or other.

There’s also a matter of judgments and penalties for crimes and offenses and also a matter of how infidels may be treated. And some pagan religions have done human sacrifice.

Here in the West, it’s Christianity, especially Bible law-style Christianity. Carryover from it lasted until the 1950s and ’60s. The U.S. hasn’t been a Christian country since then.

Most of the early states each had their own tax-supported official state churches (the establishment of religion referred to in the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which states the national Congress was to pass no law having anything to do with). Some of the states required that elected officials make a required pre-set, pro-Christian declaration before taking office.

See The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics and the American Tradition by M. Stanton Evans, 1994, Regnery Publishing. Racial and religious qualifications to vote and hold office ended when the 14th Amendment was forced into law in 1868.

Instead of Christianity in the laws and general Establishment, we now have the antithesis of it, as mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation—“Mystery, Babylon,” “harlots and abominations” and “sorceries”—the Greek work of which means drugs.